WHAT?!

Apparently my contract states that I should work 36 and a half hours each week, not the 35 I have been working. I'm not sure this is correct, I seem to recall reading my contract and thinking "ah, the joys of nine to five". However it is worrying, I don't particularly fancy working an extra hour and a half each week. It's not as if they don't get enough out of me already. Luckily they don't want to reclaim the missing hours from my holiday.

Blog 100

Yep. This is my hundredth blog! :D To think I wasn't expecting to get past 30...

Password Expiry Horror

My password was due to expire on Tuesday, so I have had to go through the fun process of setting a new one. Oh what joy. I personally liked the old password, using it on almost everything. Perhaps that's not particularly safe, but I don't have anything particularly worth breaking into. Plus it was easy to remember, but hard to crack. It wasn't based on dictionary words, but was mutated far too much to be guessed by a brute force attack.

Sadly, UWA force us to all change our passwords once a year, and so my nice old password had to go. The only problem with this is that they also impose some excessivle tight security on the kind of password you are allowed to choose. It will try to match anything you enter against a massive collection of dictionaries, will not accept anything that happens to vaguely resemble a number plate or various other criteria. I tried various new passwords.

The first was too short. "Unix/Windows password must contain between 6 and 14 characters". Okay, fair enough.

The second was matched against a dictionary. "Unix/Windows password unsuitable because it is based on a German dictionary word". So, let me get this straight... The Germans have a word which is made up of letters and numbers, and that also has a dirty great big @ in the middle of it? Those Germans. What will they do next?

Third and fourth passwords were "unsuitable because it is like one of your existing passwords". That was fair enough. I was being cheeky and choosing passwords that were vaguely like my original password.

Fifth password was rejected for being based on a dictionary word. By that I assume they meant an English word, which was a load of crap. There is certainly no word in English that looks anything like the password I put in.

The sixth password was rejected for the same reason, but I can't remember what I entered for this one. Suffice to say that I never use actual words for my passwords, so it can't be true.

My seventh password contained a space. "Unix/Windows password must be a mixture of letters, digits and !@#:?<>,./;'`[]=-\&()0^*_+{}~|" only". Silly me. Wouldn't want to confuse the system now would I? Removing the space resulted in...

Password number 8: "Unix/Windows password unsuitable because it is based on a Welsh dictionary word

Please choose a different password." Not at all true. The removal of a number gave me...

Password 9: "Password changed for mtl1". So it wasn't based on a Welsh word at all really, was it? Unless there is a Welsh word that has a number in the middle of it. Which, as we all know, is perfectly common. All well, the password is changed. Hurrah! Now to start trying to remember the bastard thing.

Newbury

Back from Newbury after a nice weekend with Liz. Not a lot to report other than we did a 15 mile walk on the Saturday. My legs hated me for it. Liz's Pedomoter registered the walk as 13.9 miles. This couldn't have been accurate though, because we walked most of the way to Great Shefford and then stopped to see how far we had come. 7.5 miles, according to the Pedomoter. We then walked back along exactly the same route and it claimed we had only walked 13.9.

7.5

x 2

-----

15.0

-----

15.0 != 13.9

15.0

- 13.9

------

1.1

------

An inaccuracy of 1.1 miles...hmmm. I meant to check the actual distance on the map but a combination of utter knackerdnedd and forgetfulness prevented that from happening.

The walk showed me just how out of shape I am at the moment. Once upon a time that would have been tiring, yes, but not a killer like it was on Saturday. I was so shattered by the time we got back that I couldn't put weight on my feet.

A few years ago I did a similar length walk up and down the Derbyshire hills, and still had enough energy to play crazy Wide Games in the evening immediately after.

Google's Gmail system, announced on April Fool's day has been confirmed. They really are offering 1gig of free storage space.

I have no idea how they are going to manage this, I am truly amazed by it. They are going to have one hell of a rush of people signing up for accounts within the next few days as people realise it wasn't an April Fools day prank. Now that they've announced they are going to provide it, they are going to have to I guess. Presumably they're hoping their targeted ads system within the email will provide enough revenue to pay for the volumes of storage they are inevitably going to have to buy.

What I want to see is how Yahoo Mail and Microsoft Hotmail will respond to this. Currently I believe Yahoo provide 4Mb and Hotmail provide 2Mb of free storage. Personally I've never come close to filling the 4Mb of Yahoo space I have, but I suppose some people must have problems with these limitations. 1gig compared to 4Mb is a laughable comparison.

If Google can pull it off they will be the kings of webmail until Yahoo/MS can regroup.

This was one of the songs that was sung last night.

© Rolf Harris. Lyrics shamelessly lifted from http://users.durge.org/~rich/rolf/court.html

I've never heard this song before. Apparently (and also unsurprisingly) it started out life as a Boy Scout camp-fire song. While there wasn't a hope in hell's name that I could have spoken this, let alone sang it last night, it certainly made me chuckle and it surprises me that I've not heard it before.

I think a good healthy dose of some illegal stimulants would be required in order to sing that song without error!

Pikey Test

Many thanks to Burt for this innovative little, er, thing. Not quite sure how to classify it. It's an Excel Spreadsheet questionnaire which tells you how "Pikey" you are. Well worth a try. My results are shown below.

[Pikey test - link removed 30/08/2005]

Definately you say? Only a Pikey would spell definitely as definately.

Oh god I'm in a state. I feel sick, I'm shaking like a leaf, I am paler than a vampire, I'm cold and hungry. All because I drank too much coke and this is the inevitable crash in my blood sugars. I've eaten a packet of crisps (my last packet) and I've eaten three quarters of a slice of German Rye Bread (which tastest like vinegar). After these I don't really have anything I can make as such. There's soup I suppose, but there's nothing wholesome in the soups I have - they're all liquid and I don't have any bread or anything.

I got up to feed myself because I couldn't sleep. The fact I couldn't sleep wasn't helped by the sudden realisation that I completely forgot about my appointment with the woman from the Accommodation office at lunch today. I'll have to apologise and see if I can get another appointment soon. It doesn't stand in my favour though.

"Yes I'm having real cash problems, I urgently need an appointment"

"Sorry I missed my appointment, I was busy and forgot about it"

I also remembered earlier, when I was in the pub, that I haven't paid off the remaining student fee that I couldn't afford when they so helpfully cut off my computing account. If I can't log in tomorrow I will not be best pleased. I don't intend on paying the remaining sum tomorrow though, I have decided. There is simply no way I can afford it all. I will ring and offer them £125 of the £250 and the remainder next month. If they refuse I will simply tell them they can cut my account off and I will simply use another option (nmamely my own machine for the shell account and IRC, and my mtlwebdesign email account) because there is just no way I can afford to give them so much money again. I've not been able to go shopping for a long while because of them, and I do not plan on going any longer without stocking my cupboards.

Tomorrow I also plan on ringing my Mum in the evening and asking her where in the name of gods the cheque is for the deposit on my new car insurance which she keeps claiming I will receive. Thanks to her telling me I would have this money I have now cancelled repayment of my current insurance, and they are now practically kicking my door down demanding payment or cancellation of services. What I need to do is cancel the existing and buy the new insurance, but I can't do that without the money she has repeatedly promised me. Thanks mum, you've been a real help.

...My god, rye bread tastes shit on its own. Wonder what else I can eat? Hmmmm I'd forgotten about these digestive biscuits. They'll do quite nicely.

I know I'm going to be fucking knackered when I drag myself out of bed at 6. That's only 4 and a half hours away from now. I've got to get out of bed straight away too, as I will need to pack and give the car the once-over to make sure it's condition is good enough to get me to Newbury in one healthy living piece. Then I will go to work and work solidly on the mind numbing tedious task of resizing pictures of drunk people for the OLU website before then getting into the car and driving the 4 hour drive to Newbury, where I will almost certainly collapse on the spot and have to be dragged to the nearest bed/sofa/carpeted area.

Well the shaking seems to be subsiding, I don't feel sick and I'm not cold anymore. I'd say that's a marked improvement. I'm not sleepy as such though.

I've just left the karaoke night. It was all good fun until I left. I was enjoying myself as much as it is possible to when surrounded by lots of bad singing, people trying to force you to dance, and no alcohol (as I had to drive home). I think I did well. I was smiling right up until I left, but I left in a stinking mood. Why? Because, as someone was singing "Jumpin' Jack Flash" I leant across the table to one of my colleagues and said

"Have you seen the film Jumpin' Jack Flash where Whoopi Goldberg is trying to figure out the words to this song?"

As one of my favourite films that song always, of course, makes me think of the film. A simple mental association. And that's one of the best moments in the film, in my opinion. I merely wished to share. Nothing wrong with that is there? Or am I being unreasonable for then getting extremely angry when said colleague gave me a dirty look and wafted her hands toward me with an air of anger as if to say "oh just shut up"?

On that note I sat and fumed for a short while and then thought "Oh sod it" and left. I didn't even say goodbye or anything. Put my name on my raffle tickets, put them in the tub with the money, put my coat on and walked straight out. I expect a certain level of respect from all the people I interact with. If I don't get that level of respect I will usually put up with it for a time, but this particular colleage has walked all over my feelings too many times now and I won't accept it anymore.

I'm feeling alarmingly drunk considering I've only been drinking coke this evening!

I have to be up early tomorrow too as I have decided to go to work early so that I can leave an hour earlier. I will also work through my lunch-break, and I worked an extra hour the other day which I plan on recovering...which means I will be able to leave for Newbury at 2:00, getting me there for about 6:00. I'd better go to bed. I'm getting up in a matter of hours.

HAHAHAAA!

I found a rather dodgy looking picture in the photo album I am working on. The addition of one small box with the word "Censored" in it, and I have a masterpiece.

[What do you think? - image removed 30/08/2005, it wasn't that good anyway]

I swear to god Mozilla is playing an April Fool's joke on me. My photo album displays all the photos in a directory in two cloumns of pictures with each picture center aligned in its column. Just now the top two pictures were correctly center aligned, but all the pictures below were left-aligned.

Odd.

Something similar to this happened yesterday and I eventually tracked it down to a missing </tr> tag. I've been trawling through my code for the last 10 minutes trying to find what could be missing, trawling through the HTML source the browser is seeing. All with no luck. Then, just on a whim I hit refresh - and all the pictures magically center-aligned.

It's almost as bad as the secretary here who keeps telling me my shoe laces are undone. To this I reply, without looking down or showing any visible signs of restraint "No. They're. Not." When one of my colleagues explained that he had spent the night watching football rather than attending the buffet, she remarked "Oh, have you heard that David Beckham is going to play for Wales?"

At the time I was immersed in my work, but even my subconcious picked up on this as blatant bollocks and managed to kick my conscious mind into waking up, turning my head around to face her and then utter the words "You're really trying, aren't you?"

I was tempted to make up some bollocks for an April Fools blog, but I decided against it in the end. The truth is far weirder than any fiction.

Shattered

I just got back from a reception for the Distance learners over on Llanbadarn campus. There was a free buffet and wine, so I couldn't really say no. Wasn't too bad, and didn't drink too much. More than anything else I am just shattered. Wine generally makes me a little sleepy, but today I've been struggling to stay awake right from the start.

I rather stupidly forgot to put some Diesel in the car after work, which was a bad move as it is almost empty. Erk! Ah well. It should last until after work tomorrow.

Tomorrow after work I am helping with another session for the Distance Learners. This is a voluntary drop-in, so there is no telling how many people will turn up. It's all basic stuff like how to change passwords. Immediately after that there is Karaoke in the Black Lion which I will most likely be attending - but not partaking in. It's another thing I don't do. I don't dance and I don't sing. And pressurising me makes me even more adament not to partake, just in case you should ever decide to try it.

Stats

I'm interested to find out how popular (if at all) my blog is. According to the UWA stats page I've had 170 hits over the last calendar week, which isn't too shabby considering that I still haven't set up the meta-tags system for my blog, registered it with any search engines or tried to promote it in any way as such.

Right sod it. I'm going to bed before I fall asleep in front of the computer.